Twatty article. “For if it is to be effective, the prevention of AIDS must be based on a sex education that is itself grounded in an anthropology anchored in the natural law and enlightened by the word of God and the Church’s teaching”

In other words, governments are immoral or unethical if they fail to deal with AIDS according to the Catholic Church’s dictates.

Nov 23, 2011 at 10:41 am · @Reply ·

Hyhybt

Well… spreading HIV knowingly (or in willful ignorance) is certainly unethical, and theoretically, if *everybody* were either celibate or monogamous there would be essentially no transmission and the disease would end with those who now have it.

But the latter wouldn’t be a realistic expectation even if he hadn’t gone further.

Nov 23, 2011 at 10:56 am · @Reply ·

ScaryRussianHeather

While it’s true in large measure unknowingly from the beginning decades ago, this topic isn’t limited to gay men. I think another factor is being missed. That of men in Africa and other misogynistic societies forcing sex onto their chosen “partners”. No different than questioning why you see women in famine/drought countries with babies, sick, weak and starving. It wasn’t an informed “choice”.

Pope RatNAZI needs to avoid such topics and instead, focus on constantly apologizing for his role in protecting child priest rapists. This must be his sole focus for the rest of his short, unnatural life.

Nov 23, 2011 at 11:29 am · @Reply ·

CBRad

@ScaryRussianHeather: Also, much of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa is from rape (that country having the distinction of “rape capital of the world”). So women definitely suffer with that one. But what the Pope is saying is something we all already know- in SOME cases AIDS is spread through unethical behavior. But only in some cases.

Nov 23, 2011 at 11:46 am · @Reply ·

WillBFair

This guy is a monster. I especially hate his reference to ‘natural law’, which they used against us for centuries until we learned that queerness is found in nature. But now he’s still trying it against the poor and sick in Africa. It’s grotesque.
That said, gay people have to get off their lazy asses and enforce mature standards to stop the spread of hiv in our community. Condoms always, monogamy, sero division, safer sex f—k buddies, honesty, testing, and PEER GROUP PRESSURE.

Nov 23, 2011 at 11:51 am · @Reply ·

Mike in Asheville

Fucking cultist hypocrite anti-Christ!

Sex education = informing accurate information and providing condoms, etc. To the hypocrite anti-Christ, sex education equals NO SEX, like that has ever worked, just ask all those cultist pedophiles in his very own church.

Regarding the notion, “is he right” is as idiotic as asking the question, have you stopped beating your husband? Certainly there are some morons who amorally/immorally spread HIV, no one needs the Poop to point that out. But the spread of HIV is much more directly tied to access to condoms and education, both of which, the Poop is against.

God, why do only the good die young? Send this heathen to hell soon, please.

Nov 23, 2011 at 12:23 pm · @Reply ·

chuck

If all of the people with AIDS had been celibate like the Pope and his underlings there would be no AIDS,lol! Don’t do as I do…do as I SAY!

FTFA: But does [Ratzinger] even remotely have a point? “…anthropology anchored in the natural law and enlightened by the word of God and the Church’s teaching.”

Anthropology is the scientific study of human culture.

“Natural Law” is the self-serving argument that some nebulous and undefined “Laws of God/Nature” (conveniently only fully known to the proponent) always trump legal laws.

To say that anthropology can be anchored in natural law is like saying physics should be anchored in the paranormal.

“The word of God” is another absurd self-serving argument whereby the proponent selects only Bible (which concedes that God itself only ever wrote the Ten Commandments — twice, one copy destroyed, the other forever lost) passages that support his/her argument, ignoring or discarding all contradictory passages.

“The teachings of the Church” are the superstitious nonsense that formed the basis for enslaving the occupants of two entire continents and systematically torture-murdering tens of thousands of women for the crime of witchcraft. They have only scarcely improved in the ensuing centuries.

Science can never be “enlightened” by superstitious nonsense.

So no. As usual, the only point Ratzinger has is on his hat.

Nov 23, 2011 at 1:53 pm · @Reply ·

Ray

It took it to mean he was saying he has AIDs since his ethics are so poor.

Nov 23, 2011 at 2:20 pm · @Reply ·

Jimbo

I try not to take anything too seriously from an individual who thinks there are magic sky spirits and preaches from an ancient book that endorses slavery, rape and murder.

Nov 23, 2011 at 3:45 pm · @Reply ·

Cary Hartline

This isn’t a bad statement. Frankly, this is one of the most enlightened statements that has come out of the Catholic Church. You have to know your boundaries and you should keep things monogamous. This goes for both straight people and LGBT people. Even if GLBT cannot marry in most countries it is important to set a standard and show people that we have more than enough ethical and moral boundaries for marriage.

@QJ201: Duh. It’s a church. Of course it’s going to be preachy about how right it is and how you should do everything its way.

But if you take away all of his religious mumbojumbo, it’s not an entirely bad message. HIV is spread by “bad” behaviors. Promiscuity and infidelity (sans condoms, of course) are going to risk spreading HIV. So if you do those things (sans condoms, of course) you’re risking spreading HIV around which is, of course, bad, because you’re hurting other people knowingly. (If unknowingly, then society has failed you and they’re hurting you knowingly. Which is, again, bad.)

So to prevent HIV, we have to ground our preventative measures in sex education that is firmly grounded by our knowledge of human behavior and relationships.

And yea, that deliberately ignored all of his religious antics. He says to embrace abstinence and monogamy and all sorts of other “Christian” teachings and in an “ideal” world that would happen but it’s just not. Way to shoot yourself in the foot Pope guy.

Nov 23, 2011 at 7:01 pm · @Reply ·

ewe

Evil.

Nov 23, 2011 at 10:48 pm · @Reply ·

B

Err, guys, if he’s talking about Africa, then he is talking about a “straight” problem.

Check out http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/adultmort/HANNAN_Paper16.pdf – “t is estimated that almost 50 per cent of those living with HIV and AIDS are now women
(UNAIDS, 2002).” and “In a December 2002 New York Times article headlined “In Africa, AIDS has a woman’s face”, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, noted that: “…today, as AIDS is eroding the health of Africa’s women, it is eroding the skills, experience and networks that keep their families and communities going. Even before falling ill, a woman will often have to care for a sick husband, thereby reducing the time she can devote to planting, harvesting and marketing crops. When her husband dies, she is often deprived of credit, distribution networks or land rights. When she dies, the household will risk collapsing completely, leaving children to fend for themselves. The older ones, especially girls, will be taken out of school to work in the home or the farm. These girls, deprived of education and opportunities, will be even less able to protect themselves against AIDS…If we want to save Africa from two catastrophe (HIV/AIDS and famine)s, we would do well to focus on saving Africa’s women.””

African women are not getting it from gay sex partners..

Nov 24, 2011 at 12:29 am · @Reply ·

Andy

@WillBFair: Sero “division” or viral discrimation is a great way to ensure that your partners are either A) HIV negative or B) newly infected, willfully ignorant or liars who areeady responsible for the vast majority of new infections. Ghettoizing poz guys hasn’t exactly shown itself to slow the spread of the virus.

Nov 24, 2011 at 4:07 am · @Reply ·

WillBFair

@Andy: Yeah. I’ve heard the ‘let’s hump poz guys to prove we don’t dicriminate’ line. It was used in the 80s by the internalized homophobic crowd to attack anyone trying to stop the spread of hiv.
The ‘newly infected’ scam is a new one on me. But it also makes no sense.
It’s not about discrimination or ghettoizing. Poz guys have plenty of people they can get juicy with. And we’re happy to show them every other kindness, as well as a ton of special services to help them live happily.
Of course there are the newly infected, liars, and willfully ignorant. But they’re easily dealt with by condoms, testing, and honesty.
But again, these are the arguments of the self hating crowd of the 80s who tried to get us to ignore the pandemic. It’s gross to hear them again after 30 years.

Nov 24, 2011 at 1:59 pm · @Reply ·

B

No. 18 · WillBFair wrote, “@Andy: Yeah. I’ve heard the ‘let’s hump poz guys to prove we don’t dicriminate’ line. It was used in the 80s by the internalized homophobic crowd to attack anyone trying to stop the spread of hiv. The ‘newly infected’ scam is a new one on me. But it also makes no sense.”

It’s a bit more complicated. The risk of infection per sex act is the highest with people who are not yet diagnosed – once diagnosed, the drugs significantly reduce the amount of virus in the blood stream, etc. So, if you have sex with someone who is positive, the risk is lower if your partner was diagnosed and being treated then if he was infected but didn’t know it. The catch is that the number of undiagnosed but infected people is a fraction of the number of people who think they are HIV negative, so you have one effect increasing risk (not yet under treatment) and the other decreasing it (lower chance of being with an infected partner), which is why it is prudent to follow expert advise (e.g., from doctors and public-health organizations) as any uneducated guess is likely to be wrong.

The “newly infected” statement is not really a scam – rather it should be taken as an additional reason to always use a condom, with the possible exception being with a tested and monogamous partner (how you verify that he is really monogamous is, of course, problematic, and you’d want multiple tests as well in case of a lab error or an infection too recent to be detected in the initial test.)

Nov 24, 2011 at 4:41 pm · @Reply ·

Hyhybt

“how you verify that he is really monogamous is, of course, problematic…”

At some point, either you decide that someone is trustworthy (including the possibility that you’re wrong) or you don’t.

Nov 24, 2011 at 4:56 pm · @Reply ·

Henry

The pope is right in principle. Not wearing protection (for example) could spread AIDS. Too bad the Catholic Church opposes the use of condoms for any reason.

Nov 24, 2011 at 7:23 pm · @Reply ·

Andy

@WillBFair: Your head is so far up your ass with some weird notion of “internalized homophobia” that I wonder if you’d know real stigma if it ever slapped you in the face. I hope that if you ever do convert, you’re greeted with more empathy and humanity than you regularly display in your posts here. God knows, its been a wake up call to me to find myself comforted and loved by (negative) straight people and racial minorities of different backgrounds while your “precious gays” have sought every opportunity to marginalize me, ghettoize me or so simply make me feel like trash based on some ignorant delusion of self protection and haughty ideal of community empowerment. Whats the phrase you’re using to justify unproductive discrimination, “peer pressure”?

Serodiscrimination is probably the most insipid manifestation of HIV related stigma to arise in the last decade, as it neglects both scientific reality and common sense. The fact of the matter is, as you’re so fond of pointing out, HIV is “easy to stop”-if you know to take certain precautions. Those who are open about their status are the ones who are, in practice, “sorted” against, and are also the types of poz guys who are MOST likely to be observant of those precautions. Its doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that the poz guy on adam4adam who lists his status isn’t doing it because he wants to put other people in danger. Its not a “self hating” queer who plays with these guys, its one who is thinking with both heads. This is the sort of behavior that will end the pandemic, not the blind hate you endorse.

You make some half assed inductive claim that “The catch is that the number of undiagnosed but infected people is a fraction of the number of people who think they are HIV negative”. Technically, that’s true, but the legitimacy of your claim pivots on how big a fraction that is. Asians compose a fraction of the human race, and boys compose a fraction of newborn infants. A fraction can be anything from an overwhelming chunk to a nonexistent sliver. Most studies point to the former, with the percentage of undiagnosed poz guys at 50% of all who have the virus. If the 1/5 study is to be believed, that would mean that roughly one in ten “DDF” guys is in fact infected, and behaving as though he has no danger of infecting others. The percentage is probably a lot higher amongst younger men, since they’re LESS likely to know their status than older guys.

As for the “newly infected scam”, I don’t know what the hell you think is a “scam”, but the scientific reality is that people who have recently contracted the virus typically have much higher viral loads than they will throughout the course of their infection, even before they’re producing antibodies. Higher viral loads equate to being more infectious. This is pretty basic stuff here, if you’re willing to swallow your fear as readily as you swallow a load from a “friend”. Serosdiscrimination increases your liklihood of exposure to these walking walking time bombs who call themselves “clean” with the utmost sincerity, and the result has been a rise in new infections.

None of this is to say that its sensible to bareback a pozzie who says he’s “undetectable”, but that making an effort to cull these people from your sexual pool is counterproductive, and therefore needlessly discriminatory.

Of course, I’m sure someone like yourself also thinks the CDC is making up these numbers by looking for your “precious gays” in all the wrong places, like bars and bath houses (also community centers and pride parades), instead of where you think the gays hang out, which I suppose would be Grandma’s Kitchen or meetings of some sort of queer Aryan Nation.

I don’t even have time to go into your “special services” that help us “live comfortably” as provided by your “precious gays”. There’s a waiting list for HIV drugs bigger than a small town and a growing sentiment fueled by idiots like youself that has reduced us to modern lepers. Suffice it to say, I’d laugh at you if your ignorance weren’t so insulting.

Nov 25, 2011 at 2:36 am · @Reply ·

Andy

@WillBFair: “But again, these are the arguments of the self hating crowd of the 80s who tried to get us to ignore the pandemic. It’s gross to hear them again after 30 years”

You sir, are a fucking bigot of the worst order. You use people’s pain and fear to demonize others. It is no minor tragedy that hundreds of thousands of bright, loving people died from this virus while you lived.

Nov 25, 2011 at 2:55 am · @Reply ·

Andy

My apologies to B, I accidentally misread his post as part of Will’s.

Nov 25, 2011 at 3:05 am · @Reply ·

matt

@WillBFair: You are grossly misinterpreting what he was trying to say, his point is that not having sex with poz guys is not an effective means of stopping HIV. According to a 2008 CDC study of gay men in urban areas 20% of the men were found to be poz and a whopping 44% didn’t know about their status. Now combine that with the B’s point about how people not on ARVs are significantly more likely to transmit HIV.

If ARVs really reduce transmission by anywhere near that 96% figure, that would mean that it’s actually statistically safer to sleep with openly poz individuals who are on treatment than the general pool of “neg” men that includes a massive number of poz guys who are untreated and untested. I’m really sick of the massive hypocrisy of guys who sleep around and likely do so inadvertently with poz guys who don’t know of their status yet will treat openly poz guys like lepers. Having safe sex with a poz guy on treatment has a very very low chance of transmitting the virus, there have been serodiscordant couple who have sex daily for 20+ years and remain serodiscordant.

The way to stop HIV is to use condoms and get tested regurlarly, and get treated if you have HIV. Stigmatizing the disease and discriminating against people with HIV is NOT how you beat HIV, in fact that only makes the problem worse. If you don’t want to sleep with poz guys that is fine but you better not sleep with other rando guys either otherwise you are a moron and a hypocrite. If you’re really that terrified of coming into contact with someone with HIV then get in a monogamous relationship, don’t delude yourself by sleeping with those “neg” guys who haven’t been tested in 3 years.

@Eastwood@aol.com: Thanks for the comment.
Unfortunately, many poz people don’t care about others. See the excuses and name calling and circular games above.
I only wish there were more people like you to help set standards in the community. But after 30 years, not much has changed. People with contempt for the community are still free to spit their nut kookery, and no one objects. It’s sad.

Nov 25, 2011 at 1:40 pm · @Reply ·

Matt

@WillBFair: First of all I’m not even poz, and second of all my “nut kookery” is peer reviewed medical studies and statistics from the CDC. Of course you have no real response to what me or Andy said so you just resort to name calling too which is hilariously hypocritical. I guess you’re so dead set on demonizing poz people like many other gays that our inconvenient medical facts and studies just dont matter to you.

Nov 25, 2011 at 2:00 pm · @Reply ·

WillBFair

@Andy: I’m sorry. But if I had hiv, I would only sleep with poz guys. Period. I could never imagine putting anyone else at risk. It’s too far outside of my frame of reference.
We just live in different Universes, and there’s no hope of communication.

Nov 25, 2011 at 2:02 pm · @Reply ·

WillBFair

@Matt: It’s an old trick to discredit division by talking about it alone, without reference to other strategies. Sero division is only one part of the picture, with INCREASED testing, and INCREASED condom use, and INCREASED talk. So your statistics are circular bull—-.
We also can’t talk about things when words like moron and head up your ass are thrown around so charmingly. I admit, I could use a sweeter tone. But it’s been 30 years, and I’m frustrated with hearing the same excuses from the 80s. And the same personal attacks that were used against anyone who even spoke of these issues.
But I appologize to everyone. I just tried to put out a general strategy, and I let these guys change the subject again, another of their old tricks. I should have seen it coming. But I’m not smart enough to debate 2 people from the contemptuous crowd without help. It used to be 10 people. So maybe things are getting better.

Nov 25, 2011 at 2:45 pm · @Reply ·

matt

@WillBFair: I wasn’t talking about serodivision alone, whether you look at it alone or in combination with those other things it simply isn’t an effective strategy. HIV isn’t spreading because of poz and neg guys having safe sex with each other, it’s spreading because many guys continue to bareback and do so with guys who haven’t been tested, many of which are poz guys who are not on treatment. I’m not using 30 year old excuses, I’m using cutting edge studies and statistics that reflect what we now know about the disease, I’m sorry if your HIV knowledge isn’t up to date. None of what I posted was known in the 80s, so stop trying to make a straw man of my argument. You keep trying to argue from an assumption that me and Andy are some nefarious evil gays trying to spread HIV by using bogus statistics or some such, when really we are just trying to challenge unproductive and unscientific attitudes in the gay community about HIV and people who are poz. It’s clear that you STILL haven’t taken the time to read and digest what we wrote, the links we provided, or the studies we cited. Until you do so you are right we will never have a productive conversation, because you simply have no clue what we are trying to say and what we are using to back up out logic.

Nov 25, 2011 at 3:00 pm · @Reply ·

Andy

@matt: Reading through his incoherent, unscientific, moralistic and divisive crap here and on other articles, I’m convinced that willbfair is at best a troll, and at worst someone who is actively trying to sabotage other people’s lives by implanting toxic ideas that have a very real impact in the real world. Whether its calling transgendered people “trannys” and pretending to wonder why others get offended, or resorting to divisive, laughable hyperbole like “my precious gay people”, the things he says are less about making a point or even stating an opinion and more about making people feel terrible about themselves.

Nov 25, 2011 at 5:35 pm · @Reply ·

Mitch

@WillBFair: Everything in life carries some inherent risk, whether its driving to the supermarket for milk or engaging in “safer” activities with someone who is classified as “long term undetectable”. No one would ever say “I could never put someone at risk” when giving them a ride to the supermarket, even though the degree of risk is probably higher. The fact that you differentiate what your “frame of reference” based on whether or not someone produces antibodies to a virus, instead of the actual risk you present to them, speaks loudly of what your actual motivation is. Yours is not a concern for other people, but rather a desire to marginalize people who have the virus. That is the essence of serophobia.